The Iraqi Police Education Program (IPEP)

Be a Part of the World’s Most Essential Law Enforcement Mission!

The IACP Center for Police Leadership and Training is looking for State and Mid-Sized City Law Enforcement Agencies to be partners in an exceptional opportunity for the International Law Enforcement Community: Instituting a Democratic Style of Policing in Iraq.

The mission of the Iraqi Police Education Program (IPEP) is to expose visiting Iraqi National Police officers to United States law enforcement training and policing techniques. These training programs will occur in classroom and field environments in police departments across the United States. Agencies can facilitate training for the Iraqi officers by providing ride-alongs, crime scene investigation techniques, or critical incident command leadership training.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) has identified a need to expose senior Iraqi and Kurdish National Police to U.S. law enforcement techniques, policy, operations, and training. The goal of the program is to help provide them with the tools they need to professionalize their civil law enforcement institutions in Iraq. Specifically, they participate in training on leadership, critical incident, crime scene investigations, and field tactics management. A special emphasis is placed on classroom and field training on investigative techniques for evidence and forensic information collection, interviewing, and other techniques designed to afford suspects “due process.” In addition, they are given examples of effective community policing methods for engaging the local population, maintaining law and order through fair and impartial policing, and ensuring accountability to the citizens to build their trust, as a models for when they return home. Finally, they are provided with examples of how law enforcement departments work interdependently to ensure that suspect’s rights and the state’s interests are protected within legal frameworks through interviews of and interaction with these U.S. police personnel in their professional work environments.

IACP is working with over 20 state, local and federal partner law enforcement organizations to create an environment where the Iraqi, Kurdish and American participants can train and work together in a manner that encourages the free exchange of information, ideas and the establishment of professional and personal relationships. By shadowing officers in host police departments, and training with them on the street and in the classroom, the Iraqi and Kurdish officers get classroom learning and “hands on” field training. By working and socializing together, we establish trust between the host officers, the IACP staff and the Iraqi participants, laying a foundation that sustains the program in the future through the global reach of technology.

Project Deliverables:

To help cultivate and develop current and future leaders to affect change, the officers are trained in a behavioral science-based leadership development program (Leadership in Police Organizations℠) that IACP developed and is currently working with police departments in 32 states and Canada to deliver. The LPO℠ Program, the origins of which are at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s behavioral sciences department, focuses on giving leaders an understanding of how individuals are influenced, led, and motivated. It then teaches how groups form and develop, make decisions, and how change can be implemented using this knowledge of individual and group development. Armed with this information, the participants will have additional tools to return to Iraq and increase accountability, motivation, and satisfaction of their personnel, while implementing critical changes to Iraqi civil policing. The participants also receive ten total days of training (six days of the leadership training, two days of critical incident and or tactical training management and two days of crime scene management) and participate in ride-a-longs and community meetings with the hosting agency. They also receive lab and fusion center tours and cultural enrichment activities in the evenings.